1. NOTE D'ARCHIVIO
2. For bibliography of recent and older works see also Scienziati del Settecento
Altieri Biagi M.L.
Basile B. Milan and Naples 1983 7 10 and 784–6. This book is inexplicably absent from the extensive bibliography compiled by Soppelsa, even though it proves to be valuable in bringing to light little-known areas of Italian scientific production. In our specific case, the book (an anthology of the major eighteenth century ‘scientific prosaist’) is very useful in placing Vallisneri in the Italian debate by presenting extracts (apart from those of the same Vallisneri and Riccati) of three representatives of his school: Girolamo Gaspari, Carlo Francesco Cogrossi and Anton Lazzaro Moro. Gaspari makes an interesting comparison between some observations made by Redi and Vallisneri with the intention of vindicating the ‘redian’ and (thus) ‘galileian’ origins of modern eighteenth century biology. A letter from Cogrossi to Vallisneri, published as Idea del male contagioso de' buoi (1714), is quoted; it represents one of the most important texts on research on contagium vivum. Extracts from Moro's well known De' crostacei e degli altri corpi che si trovano sui monti (1740), are included; modelled upon a similar work by Vallisneri, it seems to be the starting point for Italian geology, differing from Vallisneri on basic issues such as the relationship between the marine environment and lithogenesis.
3. The case of Frisi, which is typical of the circulation of the Vallisneri's texts and his school in Italy, is significant for his critical reading of Vallisneri and also of the Swiss geopalaeontologist Joahann Scheuchzer (whose work had wide circulation in Italy, as is also revealed in the correspondence). Compare for example the following passage (in
Frisi P. Opera Milan 1783 2 316 316 regarding the general theory of rivers: ‘It was a simple fantasy of Descartes, that the sea water passed through underground caverns to the centre of mountains and was filtered and made fresh by the internal heat, as was also a fantasy that of Vallisneri and Scheuchzer, that some mountain lakes fed rivers that sprung elsewhere by means of siphons excavated internally in the clay, tufa, and rocks, which form like a skeleton of the globe’. Frisi's criticism, motivated by his belief that the geopalaeontological problem had been ‘dealth with at the writing desk of many (but not only) Italian philosophers’, aimed at the fact that they did not acknowledge (even if they admitted the long calculations of Halley and Mariotte) the evaporation phenomenon.